California’s War on Cars and Single Family Homes ~ e.g., eco-fascism

In the above presentation, Bill Whittle mentions Burt Rutan. His critique is here: PDF. I found it via a small bio done by Right Fan-Girl:

Burt Rutan, in case any of my readers are unaware is the guy that designed and built the Spaceship one spacecraft, and designed and built the voyager airplane that flew nonstop around the world. He is an absolute genius, pioneer, and generally a hero of the mind. So when I heard that he had taken a stance on a thing, I am inclined to pay attention, this is a guy that does things that work.

I started reading, and the first thing that jumped out at me is the title. “An Engineer’s Critique of Global Warming, Science” Now, this is something that I have been struggling with for decades. As many of you know, I am a civil engineer. In engineering, things have to work, so we are far far more parsimonious with what we accept as valid. We do not have the luxury of simply saying “well, the science should work out”, no, people die when engineers do that, so we accept only theories that have survived extensive testing, models that have proven exhaustively that they predict accurately, etcetera.

Anyway, this powerpoint is worth the perusing if anyone’s interested in why a well-educated intelligent person remains a skeptic on AGW.

The WSJ article about this war shows just how “fascistic” this movement is:

My April 9 Cross Country column commentary in The Wall Street Journal (California Declares War on Suburbia) outlined California’s determination to virtually outlaw new detached housing. The goal is clear: force most new residents into multi-family buildings at 20 and 30 or more to the acre. California’s overly harsh land use regulations had already driven housing affordability from fairly typical levels to twice and even three times higher than that of much of the nation. California’s more recent tightening of the land use restrictions (under Assembly Bill 32 and Senate Bill 375) has been justified as necessary for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

It is funny that a friend of mine loves classic cars but wholly endorses this movement:

…”68 percent of new housing in Southern California by 2035 would be condos and apartments,” despite the fact that census data shows that 80 percent of that region’s housing increase between 2000 and 2010 were single-family homes, indicating a clear preference for less dense housing. Planners believe that forcing people into a high-density housing will alleviate global warming by reducing the use of cars (Tulsa beacon)